Category: The Text

One way to become familiar with the legislation is to read it from beginning to end. Consisting of 88 pages of PDF and over 55,000 words, the GDPR is not a fast read. Nor, having read it, are you likely to hold it in your head. What if you could skip to the parts that are most interesting for you? This post suggests a simple approach to doing just that.Continue reading “What parts of the GDPR are most relevant to you?”

Should versus shall

Sitting down to read through the GDPR is not a casual undertaking, but initial skim-throughs left me wondering about the word should, which one encounters often in the text of the legislation. It seemed odd to me that legislation should merely suggest behaviors and outcomes; I had assumed that legislation is a recital of what you must (or must not) do.

It might be useful to compare the frequency of words like ‘should’ and ‘shall’ (known to English grammar as modal or auxiliary verbs) in the GDPR in order to understand the intentions of its creators. What are they trying to convey with their use of these different modal verbs? Continue reading “Considering the GDPR as a whole”

Step 9 of the Belgian Privacy Commission’s guide to getting started with GDPR compliance concerns detecting, analyzing, and dealing with the fall-out of a data breach. The recent recall and re-issue of Estonia’s smartcard IDs brought home to me that public relations (PR) planning is an essential part of breach preparation, not to protect the […]